I read Stephen Exley’s revealing interview with further education commissioner, Richard Atkins, with great interest. I was much heartened by the commissioner’s concerns about the impact of funding cuts on FE staff pay and recruitment. I greatly welcomed his support for the idea that if schools get designated extra cash to give teachers deserved, overdue pay rises, then so should colleges.

I was reminded of the commissioner in his former role of combative principal and Association of Colleges president, stepping forward at the end of a great speech to conference and concluding with a warning to government: “You simply cannot expect colleges to keep doing more for less.” He was, rightly, applauded loud and long.

However, several years on, colleges are indeed being asked to do a lot more, and for a lot less. It is hard, therefore, to be comfortable with suggestions that things in the FE sector may now be starting to look up.

Area reviews: jury still out

The FE commissioner’s vantage point is much better than most observers, but others on FE’s front line can usefully inform the perspective of our work as a sector. On that front line, as well as celebrating our remarkable and vital work in Colleges Week, we can only return to and amplify all our earlier warnings to government.

A front-line perspective might argue too that a projected 63 mergers would indicate an improving sector only if there were clear evidence that “fewer, larger” institutions (some born of expedient mergers for financial necessity, some creating geographically remote management of FE, some already consciously uncoupling) have really benefitted the learners, businesses, local economies and communities which colleges serve. The evidence is not compelling so far.

Despite the promised greater “resilience” from area reviews, the latest Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis, with its stark further evidence of the sheer scale of disinvestment in further education, explains why so many colleges still need emergency bailouts. More are likely to follow. Resilience has not yet been delivered.

Mismanagement rare

There are warnings now from several quarters of higher stakes for colleges in future. But that, and other gambling and risk metaphors used, seems to accept a simple model of colleges as enterprises in a competitive market, rather than, in part at least, an element of the public estate, whose success is essential to productivity and life chances (or, as some express it, that “social mobility” which addresses those “burning injustices”). The “stakes” are not as high for colleges as they are for the UK’s collective socio-economic outlook and its constituent parts, the prosperity and life chances of individuals and businesses. 

Has money always been well managed in FE? No. The FE commissioner is right to point this out. Sadly, occasionally, some precious resource has been wasted through lack of operational grip, or on speculative ventures, vanity projects, consultancy fees. These things happen in other sectors too of course – and in government departments. Such things deserve censure, and they make lurid, readable news, but there are relatively few examples in FE.

The fact is that most colleges spend most of their money on teaching and learning, keeping fast dwindling resources as close as possible to those people for whom the money is mostly intended: learners. Some of it also goes on essential transport to college, mental health support – and sometimes food subsidy.

Fundamental failure?

Directing most of our resources to securing better qualification outcomes (strongly linked to life outcomes) is an appropriate use. The modest, desirable goal of an Ofsted grade 2 should not be considered extravagant spending. If there is a correlation between being rated good by Ofsted and doing the right thing for students and employers (and, by and large, there is), then this is money well spent.

Most principals would recognise the commissioner’s apt description of their own roles as having elements of both a “balancing act” and a “nerve-wracking living on the edge”. Yet they also recognise, in the casualty lists of principals, that some very good former balancing acts among their colleagues found the growing imbalance between the job weight and the actual resources to do that job caused them to lose their balance, and to topple. They did not necessarily lose their appetite for living on the edge, they just went over it. On the present margins, it does not take a lot for that to happen.

The concluding advice to colleges – not to expect future handouts or similar – is no doubt well-informed and timely, but on another level such language disturbs. Anyone who looks (as, for example, the Gatsby Foundation does) at successful further education provisions in competitor economies will see how the resources allocated to FE and skills there is invariably referred to as “investment”, more rarely as “spend”, and never as “handouts”.  The grim warning that we face the “fundamental failure” of some colleges needs to be directed more widely now; we may be looking at a fundamental failure of our further education and skills policy. 

David Walrond is principal of Truro and Penwith College